At the end of 2009, an estimated 1,148,200 persons aged 13 and older were living with HIV infection in the United States; approximately 50,000 people in the United States are newly infected with HIV each year. Worldwide, there were about 2.5 million new cases of HIV in 2011. About 34.2 million people are living with HIV around the world. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).
The eradication of HIV-1 from infected individuals is stymied by the persistence of the virus in a stable reservoir of latently infected CD4+ T cells. Latently infected cells can be found in all HIV-1 infected individuals at a very low frequency and allow the virus to persist despite antiretroviral therapy for the lifetime of an infected patient. Current efforts are focused on identifying small molecules or immune strategies to eliminate these latently infected cells.
Treatment failure due to low drug penetration in the CSF and CNS is high and treating latent HIV is challenging. Regular MRI and CT can establish CNS damage but not viral infection of the brain. Accordingly, there is a need in the art for the agents that can detect and treat latent HIV infection.